6 ms·

Diederik Stapel’s Audacious Academic Fraud

65 points by gruseom 14y ago

niggler 14y ago
I was going to write a response, but the following comment from the site summarizes my thoughts: "If Staple's ambition says a lot about science as a business, then the credulity of his reviewers and colleagues speaks volumes about science as a religion. The sacred trust people place in science and the scientific method is sadly misplaced. The awe evoked by science popularizers like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't all that different than the pomp and ceremony that surrounds the pope. And yet, it really should be the night sky that moves us, not the flattering self-portrait that science paints of ourselves and our intellects. Simply put, science isn't all that different than other human endeavours wherein people compete for prizes. Stop putting scientists on a pedestal."
- geophile 14y ago
  The comment you quote moves too easily from the scientific method to scientists. Yes, scientists are human, and some of them are flawed, valuing adulation more than anything. The scientific method seems to be pretty good at flushing these people out, judging from the steady stream of stories about fraud in science. To complete the analogy about the awe attached to some science popularizers, the Catholic Church doesn't seem quite as good at self-correction. I can't think of another human institution that is.
- podperson 14y ago
  Science holds its practitioners up to standards and sometimes finds them wanting. If we didn't have scandals then that would be alarming. For many, many years there were no sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church. In retrospect, was that a good sign? I don't see any sign of scientists being placed on pedestals in the US. What I see in the US is rampant anti-intellectualism, a cynicism about intellectual rigor, and cherry picking findings because they agree with ideological preconceptions. We're all guilty of it to some extent, but there are now a significant number of Americans who simply will not listen to well-reasoned argument.
- freditup 14y ago
  Another powerful quote (this one from the article), especially taken in the secular atmosphere of Europe: '“People think of scientists as monks in a monastery looking out for the truth,” [Staple] said. “People have lost faith in the church, but they haven’t lost faith in science. My behavior shows that science is not holy.”'
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- dbcooper 14y ago
  Please keep in mind the difference between science and social science.
w1ntermute 14y ago
> The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me. > Sitting at his kitchen table in Groningen, he began typing numbers into his laptop that would give him the outcome he wanted. He knew that the effect he was looking for had to be small in order to be believable; even the most successful psychology experiments rarely yield significant results. The math had to be done in reverse order: the individual attractiveness scores that subjects gave themselves on a 0-7 scale needed to be such that Stapel would get a small but significant difference in the average scores for each of the two conditions he was comparing. He made up individual scores like 4, 5, 3, 3 for subjects who were shown the attractive face. “I tried to make it random, which of course was very hard to do,” Stapel told me. This sort of misconduct is shockingly common in academia, such that it is often not even seen as misconduct.
- Kylekramer 14y ago
  Really? The other elements (stopping once your data fits your hypothesis, ignoring contradicting data in analysis) are fairly common, but does any really think that making up data isn't misconduct?
  - a_bonobo 14y ago
    As someone who works in science, I've never ever ever met someone who confessed to making up data (nor have I made up data myself). Generating data and passing that of as measured data = fraud = loss of contract.
    - spikels 14y ago
      Contract? Are we taking about business or science? Now I am really worried. Is the goal to produce "tangible results" (papers, press, professional aclaim, popular fame) or try and maybe, even probably, fail to uncover something new but true? Is everything corrupt?
aashaykumar92 14y ago
Can anyone shed light on how a paper is published? I am guessing the process requires some higher authority to review the paper to check for legitimacy. If so, he committed fraud in 55 of his papers, not 1 or 2! So what irked me while I was reading is, "how was fraud missed so many times?" Someone else said that this is common in academia...if so, something HAS to be done to stop it. That's why I would like to know the process behind a paper being successfully published--it seems like a broken system if fraud like this occurs remotely often.
- logjam 14y ago
  Papers are generally peer-reviewed. However, this nitwit was just outright falsifying his data - peer-review or a "higher authority" review wouldn't necessarily have caught cooked data. Open data policies may help.
  - eli 14y ago
    Even still it just would have made it more work to fake more convincing raw data. Based on the article I don't get the sense this would have dissuaded him.
- shmageggy 14y ago
  Typically papers are reviewed by anonymous peers (other researchers in the field) and the journal's editors. This is why the fraud review board chastised the field of Psychology as a whole. Note that it would have been nearly impossible to detect fraud in a single, isolated paper His data were fabricated in such a way as to seem believable, and it's not like researchers are expected to record video evidence of their experiments actually taking place or anything like that; they just report the results. He was ultimately revealed by those who were familiar with his work noticing patterns that appeared over many papers. I don't think there is any formal mechanism in place to review entire bodies of work as a whole.
  - lmm 14y ago
    Missing raw data should surely be a big red flag; maybe not video but surely you're expected to include the individual response numbers so that other people can check your analysis, and it sounds like he claimed to not even have those.
dmckeon 14y ago
No doubt many scientists are ethical and do good work. Others may produce reports that are either not honest or not accurate. I wonder how we could encourage honesty and accuracy - perhaps by getting funding agencies to increase the rewards for people who show others' work to have been deeply inaccurate, or worse, fraudulently wrong. Consider: what were the global costs of Rogoff & Reinhart's error? How - and how much - will we reward Herndon, Ash, and Pollin for their diligence in uncovering that inaccuracy? What would the long-term effects on science be if the revelation and correction of such inaccuracies were better rewarded, and the perpetration of any scientific fraud involved more effective penalties?
- shardling 14y ago
  Ah, a way to encourage more academic infighting. What could go wrong! :P I don't think an incentive like this would work very well. What you need is more people attempting to reproduce work, which means funding the attempt, not the result.
  - dmckeon 14y ago
    Less would be wrong. Plenty could still go wrong. Consider whistle-blowing by grad students & post-docs - should that be rewarded as increasing accuracy, or punished as embarrassing to an institution? Also, I mean science to include the (often better funded) areas beyond academia - think medicine and health care. funding the attempt, not the result. Possible outcomes: 1) Reproduces as expected (all real, or all faked?) 2) Reproduction fails (failed attempt, or not reproducible?) 3) Exposes fakery in previous experiments. We should fund all of those, but reward 3) better afterward.
plg 14y ago
Academic science (at least what I have seen in North American research-intensive universities, as it has changed over the past 24 years) is no longer about scientific truth. The system is constructed (partially by design and partially due to circumstance, i.e. such scarce resources) such that scientific truth is no longer the goal. The goal now is self preservation and self promotion. The truth today is that it is no longer good enough to "just" be a good (or even great) scientist. Now you have to sparkle. Now in order to get postdoc funding you have to show how your science is not just great but also how it links up with industry. Now in order to get hired into a tenure track stream you not only need to have published your PhD work in prestigious journals but you must also show evidence to your hiring university of your ability to attract money. Now in order to get tenure you need much more than "just" a solid, respected track record of doing science. You need articles in high-end journals. You need patents. You need links with industry. You need to have been featured in the popular press. You need a track record of attracting money to the university. The more of this you produce, the higher your salary, the more perks you get at your home university. Lots of people excuse the system by saying something like: well, sure, the system has changed, boo hoo, but after you get tenure you can stop being concerned about all the BS and return to just doing good science. The thing is, people don't do that. People build a "brand" as a professor-scientist, and as their profile gets higher, so does their salary, so do their perks. At my university, perversely, the highest-profile scientists, with the highest salaries, (1) teach zero. I mean zero. (2) travel 70% of the time away from home base. (3) supervise grad students by, truthfully, farming out the supervision duties to their postdocs, who by the way, often write the grants for the supervisor as a sort of write-of-passage (sic); (4) are trotted out by the university anytime they need to boast about how good the uni is. The system has been twisted so that the goal is to get money and the means to that goal is to publish high-profile papers with simple stories in high-profile journals, and the means to THAT is to "do science". The goal ought to be good science, and the means to that ought to be funding (money). It's backwards. PS, I speak from experience, I got my PhD in 1999 and I've been tenured since 2006. I'm not a high-flyer (relative to the academic celebrities in my faculty) but I am on the A team, so to speak. PPS I'm not excusing scientific fraud ... but it's important to understand the context in which it occurs.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
denzil_correa 14y ago
CICLing : Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (Natural Language Processing) conference [0] uses an open data/software method to eliminate such frauds. They have a Verifiability, reproducibility, and working description policy which reads as follows Starting from 2011, CICLing implements a policy of giving preference to papers with verifiable and reproducible results: If the authors claim to have obtained some results, we encourage them to make all the input data necessary to verify and reproduce the results available to the community. If the authors claim to advance human knowledge by introducing an algorithm, we encourage them to make the algorithm itself -- and not only its (usually vague and incomplete) description -- available to the public. We do not require any demo or tool based on your paper, but instead a form of proof and working description of the algorithm in addition to the verbal description given in your paper. An approximation of the idea is the code submitted with Church & Umemura's paper to be permanently hosted at CICLing servers, and cited in the paper (see last line): you see, we don't mean anything complicated. Obviously, you are also encouraged to show demo programs or tools based on your method, either as part of your talk or (better) at the demo session, and we will also be happy to host on our servers such software that complements your paper. However, this is not required. In contrast, we do believe that a publicly published scientific paper must be accompanied by a minimal working description of the algorithm, open-source and available to the community. Also, we do not ask for impossible: if you present a large system, especially commercially distributed or a property of your company, then we do not expect you to provide the system. Our point is that when the software and data can be provided, it should be provided. We do not yet have specific rules: we hope to elaborate the rules basing on this year's experience, so please use common sense. See the problems this policy is to address, as well as the list of software reviewing committee and instructions for the reviewers. [0] http://www.cicling.org/2013/ http://www.cicling.org/2013/
- roel_v 14y ago
  Right, and which is perfectly useless to prevent what Stapel did. "We encourage them to make <etc>"? Instead of spending 5 days fabricating coherent data, you spend 6 - an additional day to come up with a plausible reason for not having to divulge raw data. I'm not a proponent of requiring everybody to submit their lab notes with every paper submission, in fact I have no credible solution to the whole problem at all - but feel-good policies like this are no more than something for editors of a journal to point at later when fraud is found, to be able to say "yeah but we did something" (i.e., the classical politician's fallacy).
argumentum 14y ago
In situations like this, people should take an empathetic stance. Sure, what Stapel did was wrong, and he deserves no sympathy, but everyone deserves empathy, even criminals. I'm not one who "blames the system" for malicious actions of individuals, as for anything to make sense, we must have free will. The system is not at fault, but it may be poorly constructed in such a way that individuals prone to abuse it can easily do so. Regardless of whether I keep my front door unlocked, if I'm robbed, the robber deserves legal punishment. But this doesn't mean I should keep the door unlocked. Ultimately, Stapel has paid for his actions. He's completely discredited as a scientist and researcher, and will never regain his reputation as an academic. But that's not the important question. What we must ask is why and how this got so far. How can we change the system so people like Stapel will not be able to abuse it?
maurits 14y ago
I am not to worried about Stapel. He is an outlier, and just as all outliers he is getting his share of attention in the media. I am in general much more worried about the dubious statistics and protocols that are deployed on real data. The torturing of the data, shoddy experiment design, the unpublished negative results, and the somewhat sobering realization that research is actually hard. Ioannidis formulates this quite elegantly in "why most research findings are false" [1] One thing that is painstakingly obvious, is that this whole affair was only possible because people do not, and are not obliged to, share their data and code. [1]: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...
- plg 14y ago
  This is a very important idea that is fortunately gaining some traction in academic science at the moment ... that is, the need to share data and code. Some journals even require it (sharing data that is, I'm thinking of brain imaging journals). My own opinion is that every academic scientist ought to, as a matter of course, make their data and code publicly available.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  I'm all for sharing data and code but don't you think that someone as determined to cheat as Stapel would have simply been a bit more careful in preparing his spreadsheet? Publishing carefully crafted fake data does not help, only replicating the experiment would but you can't do that for every publication. You can also demand that some kind of notary is present while performing the actual experiment, but ultimately you need a large amount of trust in science.
academia 14y ago
This article inspired me to write an essay about my disillusionment with academia after completing a PhD. I've posted it at http://mytimeinacademia.pen.io http://mytimeinacademia.pen.io HN comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624903 - I'd be grateful for your feedback

65 points by gruseom 14y ago

I was going to write a response, but the following comment from the site summarizes my thoughts: "If Staple's ambition says a lot about science as a business, then the credulity of his reviewers and colleagues speaks volumes about science as a religion. The sacred trust people place in science and the scientific method is sadly misplaced. The awe evoked by science popularizers like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't all that different than the pomp and ceremony that surrounds the pope. And yet, it really should be the night sky that moves us, not the flattering self-portrait that science paints of ourselves and our intellects. Simply put, science isn't all that different than other human endeavours wherein people compete for prizes. Stop putting scientists on a pedestal."

geophile 14y ago
The comment you quote moves too easily from the scientific method to scientists. Yes, scientists are human, and some of them are flawed, valuing adulation more than anything. The scientific method seems to be pretty good at flushing these people out, judging from the steady stream of stories about fraud in science. To complete the analogy about the awe attached to some science popularizers, the Catholic Church doesn't seem quite as good at self-correction. I can't think of another human institution that is.
podperson 14y ago
Science holds its practitioners up to standards and sometimes finds them wanting. If we didn't have scandals then that would be alarming. For many, many years there were no sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church. In retrospect, was that a good sign? I don't see any sign of scientists being placed on pedestals in the US. What I see in the US is rampant anti-intellectualism, a cynicism about intellectual rigor, and cherry picking findings because they agree with ideological preconceptions. We're all guilty of it to some extent, but there are now a significant number of Americans who simply will not listen to well-reasoned argument.
freditup 14y ago
Another powerful quote (this one from the article), especially taken in the secular atmosphere of Europe: '“People think of scientists as monks in a monastery looking out for the truth,” [Staple] said. “People have lost faith in the church, but they haven’t lost faith in science. My behavior shows that science is not holy.”'
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
dbcooper 14y ago
Please keep in mind the difference between science and social science.

w1ntermute 14y ago

> The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me. > Sitting at his kitchen table in Groningen, he began typing numbers into his laptop that would give him the outcome he wanted. He knew that the effect he was looking for had to be small in order to be believable; even the most successful psychology experiments rarely yield significant results. The math had to be done in reverse order: the individual attractiveness scores that subjects gave themselves on a 0-7 scale needed to be such that Stapel would get a small but significant difference in the average scores for each of the two conditions he was comparing. He made up individual scores like 4, 5, 3, 3 for subjects who were shown the attractive face. “I tried to make it random, which of course was very hard to do,” Stapel told me. This sort of misconduct is shockingly common in academia, such that it is often not even seen as misconduct.

Kylekramer 14y ago
Really? The other elements (stopping once your data fits your hypothesis, ignoring contradicting data in analysis) are fairly common, but does any really think that making up data isn't misconduct?
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  As someone who works in science, I've never ever ever met someone who confessed to making up data (nor have I made up data myself). Generating data and passing that of as measured data = fraud = loss of contract.
  - spikels 14y ago
    Contract? Are we taking about business or science? Now I am really worried. Is the goal to produce "tangible results" (papers, press, professional aclaim, popular fame) or try and maybe, even probably, fail to uncover something new but true? Is everything corrupt?

aashaykumar92 14y ago

Can anyone shed light on how a paper is published? I am guessing the process requires some higher authority to review the paper to check for legitimacy. If so, he committed fraud in 55 of his papers, not 1 or 2! So what irked me while I was reading is, "how was fraud missed so many times?" Someone else said that this is common in academia...if so, something HAS to be done to stop it. That's why I would like to know the process behind a paper being successfully published--it seems like a broken system if fraud like this occurs remotely often.

logjam 14y ago
Papers are generally peer-reviewed. However, this nitwit was just outright falsifying his data - peer-review or a "higher authority" review wouldn't necessarily have caught cooked data. Open data policies may help.
- eli 14y ago
  Even still it just would have made it more work to fake more convincing raw data. Based on the article I don't get the sense this would have dissuaded him.
shmageggy 14y ago
Typically papers are reviewed by anonymous peers (other researchers in the field) and the journal's editors. This is why the fraud review board chastised the field of Psychology as a whole. Note that it would have been nearly impossible to detect fraud in a single, isolated paper His data were fabricated in such a way as to seem believable, and it's not like researchers are expected to record video evidence of their experiments actually taking place or anything like that; they just report the results. He was ultimately revealed by those who were familiar with his work noticing patterns that appeared over many papers. I don't think there is any formal mechanism in place to review entire bodies of work as a whole.
- lmm 14y ago
  Missing raw data should surely be a big red flag; maybe not video but surely you're expected to include the individual response numbers so that other people can check your analysis, and it sounds like he claimed to not even have those.

dmckeon 14y ago

No doubt many scientists are ethical and do good work. Others may produce reports that are either not honest or not accurate. I wonder how we could encourage honesty and accuracy - perhaps by getting funding agencies to increase the rewards for people who show others' work to have been deeply inaccurate, or worse, fraudulently wrong. Consider: what were the global costs of Rogoff & Reinhart's error? How - and how much - will we reward Herndon, Ash, and Pollin for their diligence in uncovering that inaccuracy? What would the long-term effects on science be if the revelation and correction of such inaccuracies were better rewarded, and the perpetration of any scientific fraud involved more effective penalties?

shardling 14y ago
Ah, a way to encourage more academic infighting. What could go wrong! :P I don't think an incentive like this would work very well. What you need is more people attempting to reproduce work, which means funding the attempt, not the result.
- dmckeon 14y ago
  Less would be wrong. Plenty could still go wrong. Consider whistle-blowing by grad students & post-docs - should that be rewarded as increasing accuracy, or punished as embarrassing to an institution? Also, I mean science to include the (often better funded) areas beyond academia - think medicine and health care. funding the attempt, not the result. Possible outcomes: 1) Reproduces as expected (all real, or all faked?) 2) Reproduction fails (failed attempt, or not reproducible?) 3) Exposes fakery in previous experiments. We should fund all of those, but reward 3) better afterward.

plg 14y ago

Academic science (at least what I have seen in North American research-intensive universities, as it has changed over the past 24 years) is no longer about scientific truth. The system is constructed (partially by design and partially due to circumstance, i.e. such scarce resources) such that scientific truth is no longer the goal. The goal now is self preservation and self promotion. The truth today is that it is no longer good enough to "just" be a good (or even great) scientist. Now you have to sparkle. Now in order to get postdoc funding you have to show how your science is not just great but also how it links up with industry. Now in order to get hired into a tenure track stream you not only need to have published your PhD work in prestigious journals but you must also show evidence to your hiring university of your ability to attract money. Now in order to get tenure you need much more than "just" a solid, respected track record of doing science. You need articles in high-end journals. You need patents. You need links with industry. You need to have been featured in the popular press. You need a track record of attracting money to the university. The more of this you produce, the higher your salary, the more perks you get at your home university. Lots of people excuse the system by saying something like: well, sure, the system has changed, boo hoo, but after you get tenure you can stop being concerned about all the BS and return to just doing good science. The thing is, people don't do that. People build a "brand" as a professor-scientist, and as their profile gets higher, so does their salary, so do their perks. At my university, perversely, the highest-profile scientists, with the highest salaries, (1) teach zero. I mean zero. (2) travel 70% of the time away from home base. (3) supervise grad students by, truthfully, farming out the supervision duties to their postdocs, who by the way, often write the grants for the supervisor as a sort of write-of-passage (sic); (4) are trotted out by the university anytime they need to boast about how good the uni is. The system has been twisted so that the goal is to get money and the means to that goal is to publish high-profile papers with simple stories in high-profile journals, and the means to THAT is to "do science". The goal ought to be good science, and the means to that ought to be funding (money). It's backwards. PS, I speak from experience, I got my PhD in 1999 and I've been tenured since 2006. I'm not a high-flyer (relative to the academic celebrities in my faculty) but I am on the A team, so to speak. PPS I'm not excusing scientific fraud ... but it's important to understand the context in which it occurs.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

denzil_correa 14y ago

CICLing : Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (Natural Language Processing) conference [0] uses an open data/software method to eliminate such frauds. They have a Verifiability, reproducibility, and working description policy which reads as follows Starting from 2011, CICLing implements a policy of giving preference to papers with verifiable and reproducible results: If the authors claim to have obtained some results, we encourage them to make all the input data necessary to verify and reproduce the results available to the community. If the authors claim to advance human knowledge by introducing an algorithm, we encourage them to make the algorithm itself -- and not only its (usually vague and incomplete) description -- available to the public. We do not require any demo or tool based on your paper, but instead a form of proof and working description of the algorithm in addition to the verbal description given in your paper. An approximation of the idea is the code submitted with Church & Umemura's paper to be permanently hosted at CICLing servers, and cited in the paper (see last line): you see, we don't mean anything complicated. Obviously, you are also encouraged to show demo programs or tools based on your method, either as part of your talk or (better) at the demo session, and we will also be happy to host on our servers such software that complements your paper. However, this is not required. In contrast, we do believe that a publicly published scientific paper must be accompanied by a minimal working description of the algorithm, open-source and available to the community. Also, we do not ask for impossible: if you present a large system, especially commercially distributed or a property of your company, then we do not expect you to provide the system. Our point is that when the software and data can be provided, it should be provided. We do not yet have specific rules: we hope to elaborate the rules basing on this year's experience, so please use common sense. See the problems this policy is to address, as well as the list of software reviewing committee and instructions for the reviewers. [0] http://www.cicling.org/2013/ http://www.cicling.org/2013/

roel_v 14y ago
Right, and which is perfectly useless to prevent what Stapel did. "We encourage them to make <etc>"? Instead of spending 5 days fabricating coherent data, you spend 6 - an additional day to come up with a plausible reason for not having to divulge raw data. I'm not a proponent of requiring everybody to submit their lab notes with every paper submission, in fact I have no credible solution to the whole problem at all - but feel-good policies like this are no more than something for editors of a journal to point at later when fraud is found, to be able to say "yeah but we did something" (i.e., the classical politician's fallacy).

argumentum 14y ago

In situations like this, people should take an empathetic stance. Sure, what Stapel did was wrong, and he deserves no sympathy, but everyone deserves empathy, even criminals. I'm not one who "blames the system" for malicious actions of individuals, as for anything to make sense, we must have free will. The system is not at fault, but it may be poorly constructed in such a way that individuals prone to abuse it can easily do so. Regardless of whether I keep my front door unlocked, if I'm robbed, the robber deserves legal punishment. But this doesn't mean I should keep the door unlocked. Ultimately, Stapel has paid for his actions. He's completely discredited as a scientist and researcher, and will never regain his reputation as an academic. But that's not the important question. What we must ask is why and how this got so far. How can we change the system so people like Stapel will not be able to abuse it?

maurits 14y ago

I am not to worried about Stapel. He is an outlier, and just as all outliers he is getting his share of attention in the media. I am in general much more worried about the dubious statistics and protocols that are deployed on real data. The torturing of the data, shoddy experiment design, the unpublished negative results, and the somewhat sobering realization that research is actually hard. Ioannidis formulates this quite elegantly in "why most research findings are false" [1] One thing that is painstakingly obvious, is that this whole affair was only possible because people do not, and are not obliged to, share their data and code. [1]: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

plg 14y ago
This is a very important idea that is fortunately gaining some traction in academic science at the moment ... that is, the need to share data and code. Some journals even require it (sharing data that is, I'm thinking of brain imaging journals). My own opinion is that every academic scientist ought to, as a matter of course, make their data and code publicly available.
andreasvc 14y ago
I'm all for sharing data and code but don't you think that someone as determined to cheat as Stapel would have simply been a bit more careful in preparing his spreadsheet? Publishing carefully crafted fake data does not help, only replicating the experiment would but you can't do that for every publication. You can also demand that some kind of notary is present while performing the actual experiment, but ultimately you need a large amount of trust in science.

academia 14y ago

This article inspired me to write an essay about my disillusionment with academia after completing a PhD. I've posted it at http://mytimeinacademia.pen.io http://mytimeinacademia.pen.io HN comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624903 - I'd be grateful for your feedback